Wilmott Ragsdale to Murray, from Madison, Wisconsin, 2 May 1964 -- "hooked on Tacoma"

In sping 1964, we were getting ready to take a freighter to Europe and then re-create Rosa and Murray's honeymoon kayak trip down the Danube. Murray fainted after getting the required vaccinations and  was diagnosed with cancer. After surgery removing most of his stomach, he was advised to wrap up his affairs. Taking Rags's advice, he booked another freighter berth and we made a shortened Danube trip, from Ulm in Germany to Bratislava in (then) Czechoslovakia, later that summer. Murray lived another 36 years.

Dear Murray, 

I just got your stoical and very funny letter from Tacoma General Hospital near Wright's Park, Tacoma. It is not that I expect trifles like possible cancer operations to stop you, but it is absolutely miserable to get held up by such a thing at any time and particularly just at this time. There are inevitably other times and better times to come, but. On the other hand can you get the next ship? There's nothing like a sea voyage for a convalescence.

The sea voyage for me is that thing that I always intend to make but never manage. It is the same right now. I have a sort of offer from UNESCO to be a "consultant" to some sort of new seminar system for Asian journalists in Manila. But this depends upon a loyalty check in the U.S. and the approval of the Philippine government. I got the forms for the loyalty check about two weeks ago and after searching out forgotten street numbers going back half my life finally got the forms off in one week. ... I gave your name as a reference--for loyalty--so you may get a call from the FBI. Please do not slug that agent. Please do tell him that you have often tried to nominate J. Edgar Hoover for president. But in any case there is never going to be time for the sea voyage since the job evidently begins late in June. It is supposed to be for six months and I don't know then whether we'll come straight back to Madison or can get something for the second semester.

...

Your mention of Terry Pettus makes me think a long way back when he was drama "critic" of the Tacoma Tribune and had a moustache and wore a camelhair coat. I've never seen him since. Bill Ames at the university journalism school has just done something like a book on the Seattle PI strike. He told me he talked with Terry and referred to him in terms something like, "a fine old gentleman," which took me aback. [Rags was younger than Pettus, but not by enough not to worry about being "a fine old gentleman" by association.] I do remember Terry's father on our Academic Freedom committee. I listed this committee among the non-religious and non-political of my organizations, and called it a "social action" group. That is, I listed it on the loyalty forms. It will stick out, of course, because it is the only organization in which I had to list myself as an officer.

I just heard a train whistle here and it made me think of hearing train whistles and mistaking them for boat whistles on the 11th Street Bridge. [Like Murray, Rags had worked as a tender on the 11th Street Bridge--now the Murray Morgan Bridge--in Tacoma.] From the bridge a train whistle always sounded a little strange to me, suggesting travel and other places. Hearing the same sound in Madison suggests nothing but a train in Madison. I have tried several times to figure out why Madison has so little excitement for me and Tacoma so much. Today was not untypical of Madison. I had lunch on the terrace by the lake and watched three shells of eights race. Beyond the shells, several dozen sailboats were moving, and the Rescue motorboat was streaking out to pick up a couple over-enthusiastic sailors. A little later, I saw the serious left-wing students parading around the capitol at the square, carrying signs "Go Home from South Vietnam Yankees." On the way home I stopped and fished for 15 minutes, etc. I keep saying: it is a wonderful place, really wonderful. Anybody would be delighted to be in the wonderful place. And of course, I am, I am. 

I don't know whether four years is such a long time for me to stay anyplace and that I have reached my limit, or that I was just hooked on Tacoma years ago and still am. But

why was I? I hear quite often that going back to the home town is dreadful--you can't go back, etc. But I have always liked to go back. I think I have figured out part of my feeling about Tacoma and the region. It is that I have a sense not only of the physical place, but also of what happened there in the past. All of my childhood I was aware that where I played--in Puget Sound gulch, or at Dash Point, the Indians had been there before me. And this was mixed up with fragments about Job Carr's cabin, and the sailing ships that docked at Old Town, and the mills with their sparks at night. In Wisconsin I have no sense at all of anybody having lived here or anything happening here. If I find that the effort I intend to shortly make to get to the University of Washington is not successful, I will begin to read Wisconsin history.

Maybe that will help, but I know it will not be the same. It was not only the vague historical impressions I wove into my awareness of Tacoma (I remember now that many of the impressions must have come from the Historical "Museum"--especially old paintings (one of Indians with a fire on the beach). It was also a kind of faking of Tacoma as a setting for what I read. I always imagined Wrights Park as Hyde Park. If I needed a doorway of the mansion in Kensington, I used the doorway of some big house maybe on Yakima Avenue, or of course for a mansion, the old Rust house. So part of my attachment to Tacoma was my sense of what had happened there on those beaches among those trees. But part of my feeling was for what never did happen there, but only in other faraway places or perhaps only in books. And the second feeling, the faked up one, was if anything stronger than the first. If knowing-sensing the history makes a place more real and meaningful, then does bringing in what isn't there at all, make it less real? The Tacoma that is real for me may not be real for anybody else. So I have always felt justified in acknowledging that my feeling rests on a neurosis that I indulge and never want to get rid of.